Where's the plan?

Editorial by Greenville Daily Reflector, July 18, 2015.

Demonstrations were staged in cities across North Carolina on Thursday, including Greenville, calling on Gov. Pat McCrory to produce a plan for accepting Medicaid expansion dollars. The governor should do just that.

The “Where’s the Plan” rallies were hosted by health care professionals, advocates and citizens who want McCrory to live up to statements he has made indicating he would announce a Medicaid proposal after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Obamacare subsidies.

In King vs. Burwell, the Supreme Court on June 25 ruled 6-3 that millions of Americans are entitled to keep tax subsidies that help them afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

The ruling is a blow to Republicans opposed to the ACA, but while that opposition has merit and should be voiced, it should not continue to bind North Carolina citizens who fall into the cracks of the law’s inadequacies. Especially when the governor and Legislature can do something to help.

Esther Ross, a medical care coordinator at ECU Physicians, was among demonstrators at the Greenville rally. She said that when people with chronic health problems must rely on hospital emergency rooms for treatment, it costs the state more money.

“Not having Medicaid, they are not able to access any other medical facilities to take care of all of the other problems,” Ross told The Daily Reflector.

Health care providers like Ross and the patients they serve are right to be frustrated by the state’s refusal to accept Medicaid expansion dollars. Many of those who share that frustration in North Carolina are among a large segment of low-income, working Americans who remain cut off from Obamacare’s promise of affordable health care coverage.

The Affordable Care Act was designed to cover low-income or part time workers by expanding Medicaid benefits to workers earning up to the federal poverty line. That income level for a single person is a little less than $12,000. It goes up according to household member size.

In North Carolina and other states that have not accepted the Medicaid expansion, however, workers who fall into the earning gap must pay the full cost of health care policies they obviously cannot afford.

The flawed and inadequate ACA is nonetheless the law of the land and it is time for North Carolina lawmakers to oppose the law in ways that do not bring further harm and financial hardship to their own constituents, hospitals and other health care providers.

http://www.reflector.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-wheres-plan-2936673